In memory of the children. Pediatricians and crimes against children in the Nazi period

January 18 to May 20, 2012

An Exhibition of the German Society of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine

Over seventy years after the systematic extermination of physically and mentally handicapped individuals began in 1939/1940, this exhibition recollects this dark chapter, the “child euthanasia” program during the Nazi period. Under this program, medical crimes were perpetrated against sick and disabled persons in Germany, including children and teenagers, based on Nazi racial ideology. Through 1945, over 10,000 of them fell victim to the various programs which were designed to exterminate “life unworthy of living.” More than 5,000 children and teenagers were tortured and murdered in the Nazi “children's departments” alone, institutions which were specially created for the purpose of extermination. Children also fell victim to the “T4” gas chamber program and to the “starvation diet” which they received in the homes and institutions; they were abused for the purpose of experimentation and their organs where used after their death for research purposes.

The exhibition shows that the physicians were involved in the killings were generally not concerned with painlessly ending the suffering of these individuals, but rather with “ridding” the public of “ballast existences” whose lives were extended only long enough “to serve science,” in accordance with Nazi racial ideology.

An exhibition catalogue has also been published.

“In Plain Sight” – The Deportation of the Jews and the Auctioning of their Household Effects: Photographs from Lörrach, 1940

October 25, 2011 to January 8, 2012 

The series of pictures shown here, which encompasses 42 photographs of the deportation of the Jews in Lörrach on October 22, 1940 and of the auctioning of property from their homes a few weeks after this public crime, is a devastating visual document of those events. The original negatives for both series, which were taken by a police officer, have survived. The scarcity of written records of these events lends particular importance to the visual sources, although they reflect the perspective of the perpetrators who commissioned the photos. They give us a very immediate sense of the atmosphere of these events, illuminating facets of the social history of this Nazi crime, which was only one among so many. They preserve in pictures the faces of those who were involved on the side of the perpetrators, but also demonstrate that this crime was, in part, committed publicly, in full view of numerous spectators.

An illustrated catalogue in German has also been published to accompany the exhibition.

Facing Justice - Adolf Eichmann on Trial

A joint exhibition of the Topography of Terror Foundation, The Monument to the Murdered Jews of Europe Foundation and the House of the Wannsee Conference Memorial and Educational site.

April 6 - September 18, 2011

Fifty years ago, in April 1961, the Jerusalem District Court opened proceedings against Adolf Eichmann, former SS Obersturmbannführer and head of section IV B 4 for “Jewish Affairs.” The trial became a major media event. But it was not only a single perpetrator in the Holocaust who was brought before the public eye. For the first time, descriptions by victims received attention around the world. In Jerusalem the era of contemporary witnesses had dawned. Eichmann’s appearance before the court also triggered discussions about the guilt and responsibility of individuals within the Nazi system. This exhibition, designed around the original film footage from the courtroom, was dedicated to these two aspects of the trial: witness testimony and the perpetrator’s strategy. An exhibition catalogue has also been published.

From the Sachsenburg to Sachsenhausen
Pictures from the Photograph Album of a Concentration Camp Commandant

October 20, 2010 – February 27, 2011

An exhibition of the Brandenburg Memorials Foundation / Sachsenhausen Memorial and Museum (first shown in 2006)

The exhibition presents photos from a service album belonging to SS-Obersturmführer Karl Otto Koch that was found in the archive of the Russian secret service in Moscow. The album documents his career in the SS from May 1933 to mid-1937. In 1936 Koch took over the leadership of Sachsenhausen, the new concentration camp that was built as a “modern” concentration camp and model and training camp from which all the concentration camps were soon to be administrated and organized. Koch had previously served as commandant in the camps Hohenstein, Sachsenburg, Columbia Berlin, Lichtenburg and Esterwegen.

The Face of the Ghetto.
Photos Taken by Jewish Photographers in the Litzmannstadt Ghetto, 1940–1944

June 23 to October 3, 2010

A few Jewish photographers, commissioned by the Litzmannstadt “Jewish Council,” took thousands of photographs of almost every aspect of ghetto life. Nearly 12,000 contact prints have survived and are currently held in the Lodz state archive. Fifty large-scale photographs from the Litzmannstadt Ghetto – the name given to Lodz by the German occupiers in 1940 – are shown in the exhibition, making the little known photo collection accessible to the public for the first time. The presentation, designed as a traveling exhibition, is accompanied by statements from former residents of the ghetto and entries from the ghetto chronicle. A short overview of the ghetto’s history, a description of the photography as an historic source and information about the photographers provide an introduction into the exhibition. The photographs, officially commissioned by the “Jewish Council,” convey the Jewish photographers empathy with the ghetto inhabitants, clearly illuminating the ambivalence created by the ghetto inhabitants’ hopeless situation and their efforts to maintain their dignity and survive for as long as possible.

Fire! Anti-Jewish Terror on “Kristallnacht” in November 1938

The exhibition “Fire! Anti-Jewish Terror in November 1938” was developed in cooperation with the Monument to the Murdered Jews of Europe Foundation and the New Synagogue Berlin – Centrum Judaicum Foundation. The joint exhibition project that was planned for the 70^th anniversary of the November pogroms in 1938 served to historically document the public attack on German Jewry that was carried out five and a half years after the Nazis came to power.

Presented from November 2008 to March 2009 in Centrum Judaicum

A catalogue of the same name is available.